I've written a handful of articles on weblogs (or "blogs") before mainly showing that blogs are an important part of the modern internet. You can see my posts about blogs here. I witnessed an interesting blogging phenomenon a few weeks ago that I want to share. What I witnessed is that the blogging community does indeed define itself as a community. When a blogger is threatened by mean people, other bloggers will come to rescue the threatened blogger, providing retribution and strong negative word-of-mouth if warranted.

Case in point... Blogger Thomas Hawk had an unsavory experience trying to buy a digital camera online from a NYC photo store called PriceRitePhoto. You can read the story itself on Thomas Hawk's blog in an article called "PriceRitePhoto: Abusive Bait and Switch Camera Store" but the short story is that the store was verbally abuse toward him and threatened to sue and send the police to arrest him because he rightfully told the store he was going to write about the store in his blog. His experience is indeed quite incredible:

At this point I thanked him and informed him that I would be writing an article about my experience with his company. It was at this point that he went ballistic. He first told me that if I did this that he would not cancel my order but just never fill it. If I cancelled it he said he'd charge me a 15% restocking fee. When I told him that that would be unethical he went nuts. He accused me of trying to "extort" him and said that he was going to have two local police officers come over and arrest me. He then went on to say that as a "professional photographer" I should have known better than to try and buy a camera this way and that he was an attorney and would sue me if I wrote an article about my experience.

He told me that I had no idea who I was dealing with and that as he had my work contact info that he was going to call both my immediate supervisor and the CEO of my company and tell them that I was trying to extort him. "I will take this very personally," he said. He claimed to have recorded our phone call and said that he would make sure that I would "never be able to order anything on the internet again."

Of course these threats only served to agitate me more. After about 20 minutes of this abuse I told him that I had to go and he refused to get off the line. He said that if I hung up that he would just charge me for the whole camera and never ship it. I hung up and he called me back. I left for my meeting and he called back asking to speak with my boss.

This is by far the most abusive situation I have ever encountered with any retailer on the internet.

But this is where the power of the blogging community sprang into action. Thomas Hawk posted a link to his article on a site called Digg.com, a site where users vote (or "digg") which articles are most newsworthy where the most newsworthy articles float to the top of all news stories. Thomas Hawk's article not only became the most popular article of the day, but within a 24 hour period had become the most "dugg" article on Digg for 2005. As of December 17, 2005, a total of 8176 people have dugg Thomas Hawk's post. More than 1000 people posted comments which you can read here (caution: includes some foul language induced by the anger created by the experience).

These 8176 people are the kind you do not want to upset if you are a retailer. They tend to be well-educated and technically-savvy and are among the most innovative and influential of all internet users. The biggest long-term impact of their involvement is that the name PriceRitePhoto will be forever associated with this scandal since many, many people (like me) have written about this. This causes the set of articles to float to the top of a Google search for PriceRitePhoto. Now about 50-80% of Google searches for the topic are links to Thomas Hawk's story.

Beyond linking, a number of Digg users went on a personal crusade aimed at putting the store out of business. Users discovered PriceRitePhoto has done this before many times and dug up BBB claims to prove it. Users also went out to all to post comments on all relevant sites like eBay and Yahoo. Some users even made prank phone calls, sent prank emails and tried to crash their computer servers. Users also discovered the company runs other business and has done what it can to discover and influence opinion about those locations as well.

This story obviously showcases the need to "do your homework" on who you may be buying from online, but also shows that bloggers do indeed form a defensive community.

CNN.com just published an interview with Mena Trott ("Pundits and knitters find common ground in Web logs"). Mena Trott is the founder of Six Apart, which owns Typepad - the hosting service for this SquirrelNet.com weblog. Typepad currently boasts millions of paying members and is doubling in size every 3-5 months. Here are some things she said in the interview:

I started my blog because I wanted to write humorous stories about my life. And I think most people have the ability to do that. And once they get over the fear that everyone's going to read it or it's going to get you fired, ... when they hear about blogs, it's always about someone getting fired. When people get fired, it's not because they keep a blog, it's because they have no judgment...

What we need to do is get people informed and make it as easy to use as e-mail. I hope it doesn't take 10 years to get that way with blogging.

That's what the Internet is to me. It has given me a voice that I had never imagined. ... There's a power you can harness if you know how to use a medium.

By the way, here original blog is still online and can be found at DollarShort.org.

While it's understandable that many people don't really understand the power of weblogs (or "blogs") due to their novelty, it's not acceptable when professional researchers and newspaper columnists just don't see the situation clearly.

Take this USA Today column ("Once blogs change everything, fascination with them will chill") written by Kevin Maney, the article basically says that blogs are over-hyped and that no one will really care about them in the future. But Mr. Maney, who ironically is a Technology columnist, misses the point completely.

Blogs make publishing internet content easy. Period.

That is why there are now 50-75 million blogs in the world (or 60 million or more according to The Blog Herald). In fact, it's conceivable that there could be 250 million blogs by 2010. In either case, blogs have already caused "Rathergate" and gave a boost to Howard Dean in the last US presidential election.

Another misguided piece of work entitled "Buzz, blogs and beyond" was co-authored by professional market research companies Pew Internet and Buzz Metrics. The Blog Herald has written two excellent reviews on what has become known as the "Pew" article: "Guess how big the Pew sample was?" and "It's time to boycott Pew Internet". Basically, the research only considered 40 blogs. Let's see, 40 blogs is certainly less than the 50-75 million that exist in the world, certainly not enough to warrant sweeping conclusions about ALL blogs. As The Blog Herald eloquently and jokingly points out:

How about I visit Hicksville, USA, and poll the views of 40 locals and then put out a statement to say that the finding reflects all Americans. The results would read: Yes Guns, No Gays, Nuke Iraq, burn the Koran and Women in the Kitchen. Would it be fair if I did this? No, and neither is the rubbish being peddled by Pew and used by others as a means to attack the blogosphere.

On top of that, Pew is confusing spurious correlation for a cause-and-effect relationship.

I do have some suggestions for the USA Today and Pew Internet:

Read lots of blogs, not just 40, but millions. No, make that tens of millions. And if you want to understand the analytics behind blogs, we recommend using a quality company like Intelliseek's BlogPulse (which has an excellent blog tracking tool called Trend Search).

Explain to your audience why these tens of millions of people are investing their own time in maintaining blogs.

Stop thinking like "old school" columnists and researchers. The paradigm is changing.

Or, if you want ratings, continue writing stupid things and we'll be happy to blog about you.

The rapid growth of the 10 million or so weblogs means a new infrastructure is starting to take place on the internet, one which requires new navigation techniques. Most weblogs have something called permalinks.

Permalinks, like the name sounds, are permanent links to an article posted on a weblog. They are needed because weblogs are continually updated, with the new content always being added to the top (forcing other articles down on the list). Thus, if you ever want to cite or permanently bookmark a specific posting, you should cite the permalink.

Where do you find the permalink? Permalinks are found at the bottom of a posting. Just click on the "Permalink" will take you to a permanent listing of the article. Here's an example (click to enlarge):

Jon Stewart of the Daily Show recently poked some fun at the 24 hour news networks who are starting to read blogs live while doing the news. Reading blogs could be cool if the hottest topics of the moment were covered, but the 24 hours news services are missing the point because blogs are inherently an online phenomenon.

If the news networks want to harness to power of blogs, they should do so by putting their best journalists on the hottest blog posts of the day, not some second or third rate journalist fresh out of college. Blogs are important because they circulate and propagate news that blog writers and readers think is important, which is the exact opposite of how traditional news works (over-hyping over-doing over-used stories). I mean, daily Michael Jackson stories? Who really cares?

Anyway, back to what Jon Stewart said on the Daily Show about the 24 hour news networks:

They've exploded in popularity because the better blogs provide the kind of frank, uncensored discussion and tenacious fact checking sorely lacking on cable news channels. Well, I have to tell you the cable news channels have responded. Not by improving those areas of the programming, but by airing their same (bad) programming about blogs.

After showing some newscasters literally reading blogs on TV (including one who is reading a "page not found error"), he then says:

By reading the blogs on TV, the 24 hours news networks have combined the visual pizazz of a text file with the deep insight of a 90 second news segment.

He then rips on CNN Inside the Blogs:

You know, when I want hard hitting news, I turn to CNN... who turns to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

Lastly, he shows similar clips of newscasters reading blogs on MSNBC Connected Coast-to-Coast. At the very least, it is a cool idea that each of the MSNBC anchors have their own blogs.

Fox News is the only 24 hour news service that does not read blogs online. And I think they should keep it that way. Blogs belong on the blogosphere, not read line-by-line on boring TV shows looking to fill time with fluff.

But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business -- including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite.

Here's a great article describing the top blogging sites, include Typepad, Yahoo360, Blogger (from Google), MSN Space and AOL Journal. Typepad is the best overall and offers the most features but fees are $4.95 to $14.95 per month. Blogger is probably the best free site.

SquirrelNet.com is happy to announce the launch of our blog, otherwise known as a weblog. We've found that authoring new content is quicker using a blogging service, allowing us to focus our energy on making SquirrelNet more useful to you. We'll do the best we can to make the experience as seamless as possible for you.

If you'd like to explore the blog, you'll find all the most recent entries here. You can also check out the same articles in our growing list of categories, including Blogging, Educational and Miscellaneous.

And, in the chance that you happen be a resident of Central Florida, please visit the new blog started by our friend here at a blog called Lake County, Florida.